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The Agile Blog provides advice, commentary, and resources for those of you seeking to advance your Agile practices or make the case for greater agility within your organization. Check out some of our favorite entries by visiting the top posts page, and be sure to subscribe by RSS feed or email to keep up-to-date.

The tech industry has long used conferences to share ideas, products, practices, and news. In this era of TED talks, YouTube, SlideShare, and livestreaming, it's easier than ever to be in the audience when thought leaders take the stage.

The best conference talks -- even if they’re virtual -- elicit a reaction that’s visceral: they make you think and act differently. Whether it’s a jarring statistic, or a humorous anecdote, or a charismatic speaking style, something about the best talks stays with you long after the talk has ended.

Continuous improvement may be a fundamental tenet of Agile and Lean disciplines, but making real change in organizations is hard. If you’ve ever read a book, seen a talk, or had a conversation that changed your thinking or behavior, then you know that meaningful change often starts with someone else’s experience and advice.

That’s why we’re inviting you to share yours as a RallyON 2015 speaker.

Next Tuesday, February 10, our TeamStart webinar series will answer your questions about "Writing Great User Stories." Whether you’re just getting started with Agile or consider yourself an expert, join us to get and give some good Q+A. We’re going to talk about writing compelling stories that focus on business value. Here are a few questions from past "User Stories" webinars:

On the Rally Flowdock team, everyone does customer support. We don’t have dedicated support people. The people who respond to support@flowdock.com are the ones who develop, market and lead Flowdock. This is surprising for many. We often receive requests to “pass this message on to the development team”.

At Rally, we love our Apple laptops. Typically we use them day in and day out for three years or more, after which they enjoy their next phase of life.

In 2014, we started a donation program to place them into good use at “retirement homes”—organizations that would appreciate them until their useful life is over. Through the course of last year, we donated 95 MacBooks valued at nearly $30,000 to Colorado nonprofits and educational institutions. I’m happy to share a few of their stories.

Have you been in a meeting lately where people were focused on their laptops, interrupting each other, distracted, or otherwise behaving badly? In Jean Tabaka’s “Leading Collaborative Meetings” class, Jean talks about the importance of working agreements to create the safety that makes productive dialogue possible.

Everyone knows you need more than a whiteboard and stickies to practice Agile at scale. But the tool you use isn’t the only thing that matters: as Dean Leffingwell (founder of the Scaled Agile Framework®, or SAFe®) has said,

In his book, Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan suggests that every organization consists of “tribes” at different stages. At the lowest level is the tribe who thinks, “Life sucks.” From there it goes up to “My life sucks,” then “I’m great,” then “We’re great,” and finally to “Life’s great.”